How we tested IP address-management tools

The Proteus/Adonis, VitalQIP, and IPControl product have professional services included in their prices. We scheduled a time for a representative professional engineer to come to our lab and set up their product. Only one company was allowed at a time. With EasyIP, we set up a Windows Server 2003 machine with IIS and .Netv1.1 and then installed the EasyIP software. The next step was to populate the product’s database with the test data which we accomplished through the data import/export test.

We tested the import/export functions of the IPAM products by feeding the products a set of CSV files from a production DNS installation with more than 70,000 active IP addresses. Then, we took the information from the IPAM solution and exported the addresses to a DNS service. If the solution includes DNS services we used those. After the export was complete, we ran a script that reads from a list of known DNS name and IP address pairs to confirm that both the addresses and names are returned properly. From our dataset of more than 70,000 active IP addresses, this translates to over 200,000 DNS name and IP address pairs. We calculated a percentage of successful pairs by dividing the number of successful responses by the total number of pairs tested.

We set up users, changed data, along with other common user functions to gauge the user experience. As we went through each of the products, we created a list of useful features noting the unique features and tried the feature when feasible.